The Scotch-Irish, however, stayed on in Watauga.
They had had enough of injustice and were glad to escape a country where the more prosperous were making life hard for the less fortunate immigrants who continued to come down the Virginia Valley, and the mountain people who settled in the rugged western part of the state. Like their Scotch-Irish brothers in Pennsylvania, they had determined to find a remedy. They remembered how the Rangers in the Pennsylvania border settlements had been forced to take matters in their own hands to protect life and home, and they organized their protective band called the Regulators. If armed force was needed, they meant to use it. They found the Governor as indifferent to their appeals for fairness as the Pennsylvania Assembly had been to the Rangers’ protests. If North Carolina’s Governor had been a man of cool and fair judgment, the tragedy of Alamance might have been averted. On the other hand, the first decisive step toward American independence might have been lost, or at least delayed.
In ironic response to the pleas of the Regulators, the Governor of North Carolina summoned a force of one thousand militia men and led them into the western settlements. At the end of the day, May 16, 1771, two hundred and fifty of the two thousand Regulators who had gathered with their rifles at Alamance when they heard of the coming of the militia, lay dead. The living were forced to retreat.
If Robertson had planned his return it could not have come at a more auspicious moment. His neighbors had been sorely tried. They eagerly welcomed words of a better land in which to live, and sixteen families followed their leader to the Watauga country.
Things loomed dark for the new settlers for a time. It turned out that the lands staked out for them were neither in Virginia nor Carolina. Indeed Robertson and his neighbors found themselves quite “outside the boundaries of civilized government.”
The Scotch-Irish had not forgotten Ulster, and they lost no time in making a treaty with the Indians upon whose territory they really were. They drew up leases, and some of the seventeen families even purchased part of the land.
Soon the ax was ringing in the forest. A cluster of cabins sprang up. Another settlement was established and before long thousands came to join the seventeen families who had followed James Robertson. So long as there had been only a handful of neighbors the problem of government did not present itself. The level-headed thinkers of the group again put their heads together and pondered well. Now that they had burned their bridges behind them they must make firm the rock upon which they built. Above all they must stand united, with hearts and hands together for the well-being of all. To that end they formed an Association, the Watauga Association they called it, and adopted a constitution (1772) by which to live. It was “the first ever adopted by a community of American-born freemen,” says Theodore Roosevelt in The Winning of the West.
If Daniel Boone had been a man to glow with pride he might well have done so over the outcome of that first hunting trip he made to the Watauga country. But Daniel was a hunter, an adventurer, an explorer who loved above all else space. He didn’t like being crowded by a lot of neighbors. So again in 1773, calling his little family around the fireside one night, he told them he meant to pull up stakes and move on. They had only been there four years which was a brief time considering the laborious journey they’d had to get there, the hardships of life, of clearing ground and taking root again. However, if Rebecca offered protest it was overcome. Daniel had a way with him. Perhaps she even helped her husband convince members of her family that it was the thing to do. Her folks, the Bryans, told others. The word passed around the family circle until forty of the Bryans had decided they’d join Daniel and Rebecca. Boone sold his home. Why bother with it! He’d probably never be back there to live, for this time Daniel and Rebecca, with their children, the Bryans, and Captain William Russell, were going on a long journey. They were headed for Kentucky. Daniel had told them some fine and promising yarns about his lone expedition to that far-off country.
The way wasn’t easy. Following watercourses, fording swollen streams, picking their way over rocks and loose boulders, through mud and sand. Besides there was the constant dread of the Indian. Their fears were confirmed before they reached Cumberland Gap. While they were still in Powell Valley a band of Indians attacked Boone’s party. The women huddled together in terror while the men seized their guns.
But for all his skill as a marksman, Daniel Boone could not stay the hand of the Indian whose arrow pierced the heart of his oldest son. There was another grave in the wilderness and the disheartened party returned to the Watauga country. This time, however, Boone settled in the Clinch Valley.